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Here's a story I'm not proud of. Once, in an effort to teach Marshall McLuhan's concept of integral awareness in my communication theory class, I put up a big-screen version of a Magic Eye photo.1 It was a faux sylvan scene, lots of trees and ferns and tulips and—if you scrunched your eyes and looked at it sideways—a 3-d recycling symbol. Some of my students saw it right away. I knew what they were seeing, because the website where I'd found the picture let me click the image into the foreground. But—and here's the embarrassing part—I couldn't make out the image.
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Eugene Peterson is enough of a reader of Walter Ong to know that our Western ocular habits break things down—hence my seeing nothing but tulip petals and fern fronds. Peterson is also a reader of Albert Borgmann, whose books question whether my students' technological adeptness orients them for a life well-lived. These two concerns—how we read and how we live—inform Peterson's second and third "conversations in spiritual theology," Eat This Book, and The Jesus Way, in a series that will comprise five volumes when complete.
The title of the first work draws on the prophet Isaiah's word hagah, "to refer to a lion growling over his prey the way [a] dog worried a bone." In Peterson's gloss,
Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the word, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
In other words, the Word of God digested as the bread of life becomes a part of us, or—to use McLuhan's imagery—an extension of ourselves. The virtue of this highly participatory understanding of reading is that it discourages our visualist tendency to set the text apart from ourselves in order to tear it apart. Peterson encourages instead a reading more like the dialogic exchanges of an oral culture: we listen to the Word and so take it into ourselves.
The food and tool imagery, however, can complicate each other, especially when biblical digestion is hampered by biblical instruments. The Bible, after all, comes to us as a technology, a printed book; and because we often use tools for the sake of mastery, it's easy to go wrong with this particular tool, too. "We pick up a Bible," says Peterson, "and find that we have God's word in our hands, our hands." It may be hard to know exactly what McLuhan meant by saying that the medium is the message, but it's clear what Peterson means: we too often make a mess of this medium.
I guess the first time I noticed the Bible as a tool in my hands was when my version developed, shall we say, compatibility issues. In our church, folks have many different kinds of study Bibles, but two in particular are popular: "The Spirit of the Reformation Bible" with the New International Version or "The Reformation Study Bible" with the English Standard Version. My wife has one, and I the other. You'd think ours would be a happy marriage. But we keep catching ourselves wishing that the more than 60,000 study helps of the one could be put with the souped-up translation of the other. The just shall live by interface.
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